The exponential growth and use of electronic devices is rapidly depleting available spectrum. To compensate, industry, academia, and even standards bodies, such as IEEE 802.11 WLAN, have focused on developing new communication mechanisms to deal with the spectrum scarcity. One such technology recently introduced is full-duplex communications. Full-duplex communications is a new communication system mechanism that enables a wireless device to send and receive packets at the same time and on the same frequency band. Full-duplex communication can significantly improve spectrum efficiency by allowing wireless radios to simultaneously transmit and receive data using self-interference cancellation (SIC) technologies in analog RF circuitry and digital signal processing.
However, despite the implementation of full-duplex communications, issues exist that remain to be resolved. For example, the current full-duplex implementation requires a new MAC design which can involve additional overhead for operations including opportunity identification and link setup. In opportunity identification, overhead is incurred as the access point (AP) searches for a station (STA) for uplink transmission. In link setup, overhead is incurred as additional control data packet exchange may be necessary to share relevant information (e.g.,) and to establish the communication between the AP and the STAs. As another example, the full-duplex throughput may underperform half duplex throughput. This scenario is possible in instances where the actual data transmission duration is not significantly longer than the time spent for full-duplex opportunity detection and link setup. In yet another example, the system enabled for full-duplex communications is always on regardless of the actual performance benefit. Therefore, regardless of the system performance, the AP continues to search for a STA and link setup costs increase in packet transmission. Therefore, it is with these and other considerations that the present improvements have been developed.